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A review by newravenn
The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner
1.0
I wanted to like this book because of the false hope BookTok gave me, but alas, this book put me in such a bad reading slump that it took me MONTHS to get through a couple hundred pages or so.
This book never made me care about the characters. I didn't care for Caroline, I didn't care for Nella, and I didn't care for Eliza, despite her adolescence being used as a shortcut to sympathy later on down the road.
I usually stick to high fantasy but wanted to venture out of my comfort zone with this one, and boy, did it rush me right back into it.
There's no sense of high stakes whatsoever, crippled by the fact that I'm never persuaded to enjoy these characters, and this is only compounded when we find out that no one actually dies at the time we originally "believed" them to.
My main takeaway from this is that I was just *bored* reading the whole thing. Books I purchase I make a point to finish (sometimes out of spite.) There's no discoveries in this that Caroline finds out that the reader doesn't already know (or can infer easily) and it's like watching paint dry.
This book never made me care about the characters. I didn't care for Caroline, I didn't care for Nella, and I didn't care for Eliza, despite her adolescence being used as a shortcut to sympathy later on down the road.
I usually stick to high fantasy but wanted to venture out of my comfort zone with this one, and boy, did it rush me right back into it.
There's no sense of high stakes whatsoever, crippled by the fact that I'm never persuaded to enjoy these characters, and this is only compounded when we find out that no one actually dies at the time we originally "believed" them to.
My main takeaway from this is that I was just *bored* reading the whole thing. Books I purchase I make a point to finish (sometimes out of spite.) There's no discoveries in this that Caroline finds out that the reader doesn't already know (or can infer easily) and it's like watching paint dry.